Art Practice students awarded CRG Grants for 2023/2024
Image: Christine Santos (BA’24), “Archival Densities,” 2024, installation view, Worth Ryder Art Gallery.
Congratulations to Art Practice graduate student Valencia James (MFA’24), and undergraduate Art Practice majors Christine Santos (BA’24) and Samantha Cruz (BA’25) for receiving grants through the Center for Race and Gender in support of their creative research projects!
From the CRG website: Since the establishment of CRG's Student Grants Program for Research and Creative Projects in 2003, CRG has awarded over $223,000 in grants to 145 undergraduates and 213 graduate students for research projects that are oriented towards academic work or that approach race and gender from the perspectives of media, fine arts, and performing acts.
VALENCIA JAMES (Spring 2024)
Department: Art Practice
Project Title: Ceremonial
Ceremonial is an immersive installation that invites the viewer to stand in the center and to think of their bodies as ceremonial conduits of communication with their ancestors. The installation which combines sculpture and video, references maritime history and traditions as well as African diasporic spiritual rituals and community maypole plaiting traditions found in Barbados as well as diverse cultures around the world. Rooted in research into the Barbados Landship tradition, it weaves together themes of Black self-determination, Black gathering and joy, shipping and trade, to honor the legacies of innovative systems of care and resilience in the face of colonial violence. This installation is currently being created as the thesis capstone requirement for the MFA in Art Practice program and will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, May 1st-July 21st, 2024.
SAMANTHA CRUZ (Spring 2024)
Department: Ethnic Studies
Project Title: Mapping the San Diego Yaqui Native American Diaspora
Native to Sonora, México, Yaquis also have histories along the Rio Yaqui River and throughout the US-Mexico borderlands. Strategic efforts of erasure make Tucson, Arizona the only federally recognized Yaqui ancestral homelands in the US, although San Diego is also home to one of the largest Yaqui populations. Samantha’s project identifies the ways San Diego Yaquis experience and engage in diasporic placemaking currently and historically. This summer she will review archival documents, conduct interviews, and photograph urban transformations in San Diego. Samantha will then apply her data towards her senior thesis, the curation of a digital archive, and create a map tracing patterns within the San Diego diaspora. Samantha’s research contributes to Yaqui scholarship created by Yaqui scholars that exemplifies previously underrepresented US Yaqui diaspora communities.
CHRISTINE SANTOS (Spring 2024)
Department: Art Practice
Project Title: Archival Densities: Expanded Research and Art Proposal
The proposed research and artworks are a part of the ongoing installation series - "Archival Densities". This series aims to challenge colonial narratives and commodity fetishism within the Digital Archives of Hawai’i by presenting speculative Filipino protest photos, obscured travel destination postcard tropes, and reproduced Kaho'olawe Stop the Bombing t-shirts spanning the 20th century. These elements of resistance against US colonialism are concealed within the state archive, which instead engineers a docile visual narrative of Filipino immigrants, the land, and Native Hawaiian peoples. In negotiating this form of control through civil resistance for Hawaiian Sovereignty in the installation, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum also represents historical negotiations between Native Hawaiian cultural heritage and institutional histories. Focusing on photographic research at a site with contentious histories is pertinent to understanding contemporary issues of tourism and urbanization in Hawai'i. A selection of 50 photographs depicting tourists' activities and plantation societies throughout state histories will be transformed through screen printing techniques to metaphorically strain and question the colonial fantasies that govern them. The final artwork will compile these failed images into a large-scale tiled print.
To learn more about the CRG Grant, application, and grantees, visit their website.